Anand Mahindra, one of the richest Indians has proposed that he is willing to fund India’s own social networking company after the big scandal of privacy leak by Facebook.
Anand Mahindra, whose Mahindra Group business empire spans everything from cars to real estate, sparked a flurry of brainstorming as Facebook reels from a scandal over the misuse of its user data. He said that he was overwhelmed by the response he received with many entrepreneurs and start-ups, came forward to take up the challenge
An Indian billionaire who promised to help fund a rival to Facebook said Wednesday he had been “overwhelmed” with the response as the world grapples with concerns about data privacy.
Mahindra earlier this week urged India’s tech entrepreneurs to devise “our own social networking company” and offered seed funding to startups to get the better ideas rolling.
The invitation provoked a flood of proposals, even from his own chief digital officer Jaspreet Bindra who was tempted by his boss’s offer.
“To say I’m overwhelmed by the responses to my call for social network startup proposals would be an understatement!” Mahindra posted on Twitter on Wednesday.
“The good thing is that it’s clear there’s an explosion in entrepreneurial energies in this country. Let the games begin!”
India has the world’s highest number of Facebook users with 241 million active members, according to a report published last June by Amsterdam-based firm The Next Web.
India’s IT minister warned Facebook against any abuse of social media in elections. India is preparing for general elections in 2019 and there are also a number of state polls due this year and next.
This surely seems to be a step in the positive direction, in the wake of thousands of users canceling their Facebook accounts because of the data leak scandal. India surely does need its own social networking platform to stop these kinds of malpractices by tech giants like Google and Facebook.
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